Liz Delillo
Staff Writer
At 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, Jonah Goldberg and Jonathan Rauch will discuss polarization and its underlying factors, closing out this week’s Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Four theme, “The Future of the American Experiment — A Week in Partnership with American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution.”
“There’s a lot of ‘chicken or the egg’ stuff going on. Is the polarization causing the problems, or (are) the problems causing polarization? And the answer at the end of the day is both,” Goldberg said.
Goldberg is a senior fellow and Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at AEI. He is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, a Los Angeles Times columnist and a commentator for CNN. He is the author of Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy; The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas; and Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change.
“Congress itself is fundamentally broken; it doesn’t do the job that it was created to do, which is to hammer out political differences,” Goldberg said. “It’s the institution where politics is sort of supposed to happen, where you have committee hearings and regular order and horse trading, and you get a sort of rough consensus about what people want in this country by process of hammering out regional differences, class differences, ideological differences. It just doesn’t do that anymore.”
He shared how problems such as congressional dysfunction in American governance, in turn, feed political polarization.
“These ideas have been tried again and again and again and again — and they don’t work,” Goldberg said. “But when you say the current system doesn’t work, it is completely natural for people to look for alternative systems, and that makes people lose their faith in this American experiment, which is in fact responsible for liberating more people and enriching more people and creating more wealth than any other idea in human history.”
Rauch believes that looking at the underlying causes of polarization are critical for addressing it.
“A lot of this is just about understanding how those factors have come to inflame and divide us — and divided us very closely as Americans — so we keep having basically 50-50 election elections, and neither party seems to be able to assemble,” Rauch said.
Rauch is a senior fellow at Brookings’ Governance Studies program and Center for Effective Public Management. He is also on the board of directors at the Institute for American Values as well as a contributing editor at The National Journal and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of many books, including The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth; Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy; The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better after 50; and Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.
“It’s especially hard to get Congress functioning in a 50-50 environment where the two parties have what’s called affective polarization,” Rauch said. “Polarization can be policy, or ideological polarization — you know, I want taxes to be lower, you want them to be higher. Those issues are difficult, but they often can be compromised or worked around.”
He elaborated how affective polarization differs, rooted not necessarily in policy but in affect toward others.
“Affective polarization is when people don’t just disagree about policy — in fact sometimes they don’t disagree about policy — but they do hate and fear the other party, and they answer ‘yes’ to questions like, ‘Does the other party endanger your way of life?’ ‘Does the other party threaten you and make the country unsafe?’ ” Rauch said. “And that skyrocketed in the past 10 to 15 years, and that’s a much harder form of polarization to deal with.”
Previously, people getting their news from the same media outlets helped them draw from the same sets of facts, but with the rise of social media and a decrease in people turning to traditional news media, people obtain their information from a variety of sources.
“There’s more diversity now in the media environment but also a lot more fragmentation, and there are now business models for capturing eyeballs by being outrageous, by trolling, defending, ridiculing, conspiracyism, fake news, and that’s not entirely new,” Rauch said. “… It’s now a major business model, and it’s hard for traditional fact-based media to compete with someone who can make money by just sitting on their sofa, making stuff up, so the media environment has become more challenging from the point of view of holding the country together.”
However, even with a fractured media environment, Rauch believes there’s hope.
“There is more common ground than people believe,” Rauch said. “One of the things that helps reduce polarization is showing people that, when you ask Republicans and Democrats their actual stances on issues, they’re much closer together than they believe them to be by a factor of two. The other side is not as extreme as you think, and they’re not as antithetical as you think.”
